Humans have always and everywhere made or done something on or with « nature ». But the questions aren’t the same everywhere and consequently the resulting decision-making process may follow entirely ... [more ▼]

Humans have always and everywhere made or done something on or with « nature ». But the questions aren’t the same everywhere and consequently the resulting decision-making process may follow entirely divergent paths. The undertakings of introduced or re-introduced species have multiplied though their success has never been guaranteed. Examining these undertakings closely, we discover that they are as much combinations of people’s recipes, technoscience formulas as well as those surprises that living beings have always been full of. In this paper, we support this idea by following trajectories of the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) towards Australia or new-Zealand. We study the many ways these have crossed other ways of starting a relationship with non-humans on the one hand, and applied ecology on the other hand, which had just been discovered at the beginning of the 20th century. Several controversies have followed one after another since then. These can be described as crises or moments to blot out. For us, these controversies essentially represent ways of revealing a reestablishment of order. There are no clear categories and no obvious balance in these case histories. Only living beings which meet, transform, overlap and shirk each other. [less ▲]